Bound by moon and blood

Chapter 7; Quiet hunger

LUCIEN

The journey back to Vespera felt longer than the one to Seraphis.

I sat in the carriage with the curtains drawn and watched the dark landscape slide past without truly seeing it. Cassian remained silent for most of the ride, which I appreciated. He understood when words would only press against a wound still too fresh.

The Council’s decision sat in my chest like a stone I could not swallow. I had agreed. I had spoken the words with the calm they expected. But calm did not mean acceptance. It only meant I had chosen the path that would cost the least blood in the short term.

When the black towers of the Crimson Palace finally rose against the red sky, I felt no relief. Only the familiar weight of home and the knowledge that my own court would not receive the news quietly.

They were already waiting.

The moment I stepped into the main council chamber, the air changed. Lords and ladies who had been speaking in low voices fell silent. Eyes followed me as I walked to the head of the table. I did not sit. Sitting would have invited a longer argument.

“I accepted the Council’s terms,” I said clearly. “Lycanor and Vespera will present a public alliance. Joint appearances. Shared inspections. Careful words in front of the realm.”

The reaction was immediate.

Lord Marcellus was the first to speak, voice sharp with disbelief. “You agreed? Without demanding proof of their crimes? Without conditions?”

“You cannot be serious,” Lady Isolde added. “That animal sits on a throne of blood and you offer him your hand?”

Others joined in. Accusations of softness. Warnings about weakness. Claims that the court would lose respect, that the border would only grow more dangerous, that I was repeating my mother’s mistakes.

I let them speak.

Their anger was expected. Their fear was familiar. I had grown up listening to versions of the same arguments. Peace was always called naïve until the graves became too many to count.

When the voices finally began to overlap, I raised one hand.

The room quieted.

“I am still your king,” I said, voice even. “I have heard your concerns. They change nothing. The decision is made. We will honor it. This meeting is over.”

Marcellus’s face darkened. “You are too soft, Your Majesty. One day that softness will cost us everything.”

I met his eyes without flinching. “If it does, the failure will be mine alone. Now leave.”

They left. Some with stiff bows. Some with barely hidden resentment. Cassian remained until the last of them had gone, then closed the doors.

“That went as well as expected,” he said quietly.

“It went exactly as expected,” I answered. “Have someone bring me everything we have on Kael Thornridge. Reports. Portraits. Border records. Anything.”

Cassian studied me for a moment. “You’re already preparing.”

“I am already studying the man the Council has chained me to,” I said. “There is a difference.”

He nodded and left to carry out the order.

The information arrived within the hour.

I spread it across my desk in the private study. Old reports. Sketches. A few formal portraits painted by spies who had never gotten close enough to capture anything real. I already knew most of it. Young king. Took the throne after his father’s death in a border fight. Known for harsh decisions and personal leadership in raids. Feared by his own people as much as he was respected. No mate. No close companions beyond his general and the old elder woman.

Nothing new.

Nothing that explained the way my attention had kept returning to him in the Hall of Crowns.

I sat back in the chair and stared at the most recent sketch. The artist had captured the hard line of his jaw, the intensity in his amber eyes, the scars that spoke of a life lived with claws and steel. There was no softness in the image. Only control and the promise of violence held carefully in check.

I should have felt only caution.

Instead I felt something else. A quiet, persistent need to understand him. To know what sat underneath the anger he had worn so openly at the Council. To see if the man matched the monster the reports described.

The need unsettled me.

I had lost too many people to Lycan claws to romanticize their king. My mother’s death still lived in the quieter corners of my memory. My father’s final walk into the sun still shaped the way I carried my own crown. Friends had died on the border. Good vampires whose names I still remembered.

And yet.

In the Hall of Crowns, when our eyes met, something in me had gone still in a way I did not recognize. It was not attraction. Not yet. It was awareness. A sharp, unwanted focus that refused to fade even now that I was home.

I pushed the sketches away and stood.

The rest of the day passed in a haze of half-completed tasks. I signed documents without fully reading them. I listened to reports and gave answers that must have been adequate because no one questioned them. My body remained in the palace. My mind kept circling back to a Lycan king with scars on his hands and fury in his eyes.

Why?

The question followed me from the study to the training yards to the quiet balcony that looked out over the blood-red rivers. I found no answer that satisfied me. Only the same pull, steady and inexplicable, like a current moving under still water.

Night came.

I had not fed in two days. The hunger sat low in my body, manageable but present. When the servant knocked and announced that a blood slave had been prepared, I almost refused. Then I thought better of it. Weakness would only give the court more reasons to whisper.

The young man entered with lowered eyes and offered his wrist in the formal way. I took it without ceremony and bit down.

The blood was warm and adequate.

For a moment it was only blood.

Then my mind betrayed me.

The pulse under my tongue became someone else’s. The quiet sound of breathing became heavier, rougher. Instead of the obedient stranger in my hands, I saw dark hair and amber eyes and the hard line of a mouth that had spoken to me with open hatred in the Hall of Crowns. The image was so sudden and so clear that I released the wrist at once and stepped back.

The slave looked up, startled and uncertain.

“Leave,” I said, my voice rougher than I intended. “Now.”

He scrambled out of the room. The door closed behind him with a soft click.

I stood alone in the center of my chambers, breathing carefully, trying to push the image away. It clung. The idea of Kael Thornridge under my hands, the imagined sound of his blood, the dangerous curiosity of what his anger would taste like if it were ever turned into something else.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.

“Enough,” I whispered to the empty room. “He is an enemy. That is all.”

The words did not settle the restlessness.

I did not call for another slave. I did not trust what my mind might do a second time. Instead I spent the night in a chair by the window, watching the crimson sky remain unchanged, hunger still sitting low in my body and thoughts of the Lycan king refusing to leave me in peace.

I had agreed to an alliance.

I had returned home to anger and accusations of softness.

And now I sat awake in the dark, unsettled by a man I was supposed to despise, wondering why the need to understand him felt stronger than the need to hate him.

The night stretched long and unsatisfied.

Somewhere in the frozen north, Kael Thornridge was probably sharpening his own resentment into something useful.

I should have done the same.

Instead I remained restless, half-hungry, and far too aware of a pull I did not yet have a name for.

The alliance had begun.

And so had something else.

And I was no longer certain I would be able to keep the two things separate.